by Gershom Gorenberg
About the author: Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount.
Editor’s note: At the time of publication, Ariel Sharon was the prime minister of Israel. Should Sharon be removed from office, the issues discussed in this viewpoint would still be timely. Sharon’s causes are inextricably related to his office.
The ruling arrived like a letter from another era, written in strange script, waiting to be deciphered. In mid-February 2002, the Israeli supreme court upheld a lower-court decision, thereby dismissing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s libel suit against the Ha’aretz newspaper and its political commentator Uzi Benziman. At issue was a column Benziman wrote a decade ago on Sharon’s record as defense minister during Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Benziman wrote that Prime Minister Menachem Begin—still alive at the time—knew “full well that Sharon deceived.....
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